The GM Layer

The GM layer is prose, not code, and it comes in two shapes that behave very differently.

Pinned rules documents

Two documents are meant to stay pinned, and pinned means always in view.

@Missing file is the core rulebook. Tiers, adjudication, inventory, growth. @Missing file is the prose style guide, and it exists because narration habits that read well once become a template by the tenth repetition.

@Missing file is the detailed upkeep reference, covering when to create each kind of file, what to fill, where to link it, and when to update it. It belongs on partial rather than pinned, because the triggered instructions already carry its per file rules and fire them at the moment each one applies.

Long material belongs in a document like these rather than in a trigger, since a trigger body is capped at five hundred characters.

Triggered instructions

Triggered instructions fire on a condition, and they are short by design. There is a hard limit of five hundred characters on the body, which in practice means writing to just under five hundred to be safe.

Two conventions make them work, and both are worth keeping.

The name states the condition. Every trigger is named for when it fires, in the form of when something happens. A name like When an item is gained, worn, or lost on screen tells the GM exactly when to act. A name like Manage Your Inventory does not, and it will be ignored.

The body names exact fields. Write the real field names as they appear in the schema, not the display labels. Numbered steps beat paragraphs. The body opens straight into the steps without restating the condition, because the name already carried it.

What reliably fires and what does not

A dedicated instruction with a condition in its name fires reliably. A conditional step tacked onto the end of an unrelated instruction does not. If a behavior matters, it gets its own trigger rather than becoming step four of something else.

There is a ceiling of twenty triggers. The current set uses about fifteen plus one that fires whenever a file is created, so there is room, but not unlimited room. When you need a new behavior and you are at the ceiling, look first for two existing triggers that share a condition and can merge.

The Game Start file

This is the only thing guaranteed to be loaded at the beginning of a game, which makes it more important than its size suggests. Anything absolutely essential should appear here as well as in the rulebook. The no dice rule and the expectation of full bookkeeping from turn one both live in the opening instructions for exactly that reason.

When you edit

Change the pinned documents freely. They are prose and nothing depends on their structure.

Be more careful with triggered instructions. Keep the name accurate to what the body does, keep the body under the limit, and count characters rather than bytes when you check, since punctuation in these files is not always one byte per character.